SMH: The Flying Scotsman

The stirring, largely true story of a Scottish cyclist who broke the world one-hour distance record on a bike he built himself. Jonny Lee Miller as cyclist Graeme Obree. The Flying Scotsman is the stirring, largely true story of Graeme Obree, a Scottish amateur cyclist who broke the world one-hour distance record in 1993 on a bike he built himself, partly from washing machine parts. He went on to become world champion in the 4000-metre individual pursuit in 1993 and 1995 and to break a bunch of other records, all the while battling the cycling establishment over whether his bike and his riding stance were legal.

His preferred fuel was apparently marmalade sandwiches and the movie is adamant that he never took drugs.

Given that it starts with him trying to hang himself in a forest, perhaps he should have. Obree’s struggle with mental illness could have made a great film but this isn’t it. It’s more like a rough cut, a warm-up, rather than a championship run. Given that it took 12 years to finance and only 32 days to shoot, it’s obvious that the tight budget has had an effect. Indeed, it’s probably the only film I’ve reviewed where the press kit admits they ran out of money in post-production. The director, Douglas Mackinnon is making his feature debut, although he has extensive experience in television.

With all the setbacks, it’s easy to enjoy what the movie tries to do, even if it doesn’t do it that well. Obree’s story is remarkable and inspiring and that’s what most of us want from a biographical story. His battle with bipolar disorder makes it more inspiring, although the movie never takes us far into that. He sits on his bed staring into space in a few scenes but we have no idea what he’s thinking or feeling. In his moment of greatest triumph, at a velodrome in Norway after he has beaten Francesco Moser’s long-standing record for how far a cyclist can go in one hour, he is shown in long shot, sitting alone on the concrete stairs, crying his eyes out, far from the gaze of his celebrating friends. The shot is deliberately non-invasive, as if trying not to look.

The movie is often like that - discreet, verging on repressed. It’s very Scottish in that way, except that it takes it too far. We actually need to penetrate Obree’s emotions at some point but Jonny Lee Miller never lets us inside Obree’s troubled head. The character himself is in denial about his illness; the actor seems to shut down in sympathy. You could see it as honest, or just uncommunicative.

It’s an almost completely external performance - he rides, he wins, he loses, he eats a sanger and gets back on the bike. Occasionally he argues with his friends and says he can do it alone. Many biopics give up their secrets too easily, in great gobs of emotion and life-affirming lessons. This one seems determined to avoid that but it just becomes opaque. When Graeme walks into the forest at the beginning, his ultra-light homemade bike slung over his shoulder, a rope in his other hand, we’re completely unclear as to why he is so desperate. When the movie takes us there again an hour later, we know him better but not well enough that this seems an understandable choice.

An early scene shows him bullied as a child growing up in Ayrshire - “the valley of the damned”, he calls it later - but this hardly answers the question, even when one of the bullies returns to haunt him as an adult. A little research on the internet told me more than the film ever does about his emotional setbacks, such as the fact that the sudden death of his brother in 1994 may have contributed greatly to his frequent bouts of depression. He doesn’t even have a brother in the movie.

He’s been written out, while other characters have been invented. His best friend is Malky (Billy Boyd from Lord of the Rings). They meet as bike messengers in Glasgow in 1993 and Malky takes over from Graeme’s wife, Anne (Laura Fraser), as manager of his cycling career. Malky is fictional, an amalgam of various people who played a part in Obree’s rise. Fair enough, but why erase his brother from the record, especially when he seems to have played a large part in Obree’s becoming a cyclist in the first place?

The relationship with Anne is similarly underdeveloped. She has no significant scenes in the first reel; she’s just there in the background, taking care of their son. She becomes a major figure later but it’s a strange way to introduce her character. His only really communicative relationship is with Baxter (Brian Cox), a gentle minister with a sense that Graeme needs help - although it takes most of the movie for Baxter to drag an acknowledgment of the darkness out of him.

If it’s not really about the illness, then the movie has to be about the races, but these get the same treatment. Many of his greatest triumphs are covered (but not all); some are exciting and emotional but again, not too emotional. The most incredible is the original assault on Moser’s record, which had stood for nine years.

At the Hamar velodrome in Norway, he fails on the first attempt - to the immense satisfaction of Ernst Hagemann (Steven Berkoff), the conniving head of the (fictional) World Cycling Federation. Having hired the venue for 24 hours, an exhausted Graeme announces to the sceptical press that he will go again at nine the next morning. He spends most of night drinking water and stretching, to ease his shattered muscles. The record-breaking run delivers the excitement that the rest of the movie ought to have but shies away from.